Ukraine Emoji

The Ukraine flag emoji 🇺🇦 is two equal stripes, blue over yellow, usually read as a clear sky over golden fields of wheat. The colours go back centuries in Ukrainian heraldry; the flag was first a state flag in 1918, was banned in Soviet times, went up again over Kyiv in 1990 and was officially adopted in January 1992. Ukraine celebrates National Flag Day on 23 August, the day before Independence Day.

Like every country flag, 🇺🇦 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇺 + 🇦 for the country code UA. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters UA instead, but the person you send it to on a phone still sees 🇺🇦.

There is no heart-shaped Ukrainian flag, so the Ukraine heart emoji is a pair: 💙💛, blue first, the order of the flag. Since 2022 it has appeared in many names, bios and posts as a sign of support. 🟦🟨 written one per line makes a small flag, and 🌻 is the country's best-loved flower: Ukraine is one of the world's largest growers of sunflowers and exporters of sunflower oil, and a bag of sunflower seeds (semechky) is the classic snack on a park bench.

Ukraine symbols: the tryzub 🔱, grain 🌾 and Slava Ukraini

The coat of arms of Ukraine is the tryzub, a golden trident on a blue shield. It was the sign of Volodymyr the Great, ruler of Kyivan Rus around the year 1000, and appears on his coins; the Ukrainian People's Republic took it up in 1918 and independent Ukraine in 1992. Unicode has no tryzub, so Ukrainians use the trident emblem 🔱, as in 🔱💙💛. In 2023 the Soviet hammer and sickle on the shield of Kyiv's giant Motherland Monument was replaced with the tryzub.

🌾 is an ear of rice, and Ukraine is still called the breadbasket of Europe for its black soil. A separate sheaf of wheat, the didukh, stands in the corner of the room at Christmas Eve supper, and bread and salt 🍞🧂 on an embroidered towel is the traditional welcome for guests.

Слава Україні! (Slava Ukraini, "Glory to Ukraine!") is answered Героям слава! ("Glory to the heroes!"). It is written 🇺🇦 or 🔱 after it. Since 2022 people abroad have added 🕊️ and 🙏 for peace, and two images became symbols of the time: 🚜 for the farmers who towed away abandoned Russian army vehicles with their tractors, and 🐕 for Patron, a Jack Russell terrier of the State Emergency Service who sniffed out mines and explosives and was given a medal and his own postage stamp.

Ukrainian food emoji: borscht, varenyky and salo

🍲 is borscht, the best-known Ukrainian soup, red with beetroot 🫜 and full of cabbage, potatoes and beans, finished with sour cream 🥛. In 2022 UNESCO added the culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking to its list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. It comes with pampushky, soft garlic rolls 🧄🍞, and with salo 🥓, cured pork fat sliced thin onto black bread. In spring there is green borscht made with sorrel.

🥟 is varenyky, boiled dumplings filled with potato, cabbage, soft white cheese or sour cherries 🍒 and served with sour cream and fried onion. 🥬 is holubtsi, cabbage leaves rolled around rice and meat; 🥔🥞 are deruny, crisp potato pancakes; 🧀🥞 syrnyky, little cheese pancakes for breakfast; and 🍗 chicken Kyiv, the butter-filled cutlet the world knows by the capital's name. Cellars hold pickled cucumbers 🥒 in jars 🫙, forest mushrooms 🍄 and honey 🍯.

For dessert, 🍰 is the Kyiv cake of meringue and hazelnuts, sold in a round box since 1956. Lviv is the city of coffee ☕ and chocolate 🍫, and 🍉 is the watermelon of Kherson, which people posted everywhere when the city was liberated in November 2022. 🥃 is horilka, and the wish before a meal is Смачного! ("Enjoy!").

Places in Ukraine: Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa and the Carpathians

⛪ is Kyiv: the eleventh-century Saint Sophia Cathedral and the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a monastery of golden domes above the Dnipro, together on UNESCO's World Heritage list. Most believers are Orthodox ☦️, with a large Greek Catholic church in the west ✝️. 🕍 recalls the long Jewish history of Ukraine; every autumn tens of thousands of Hasidic pilgrims travel to Uman for Rosh Hashanah at the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.

🦁 is Lviv, named after Lev, son of King Danylo, with stone lions on its town hall and in every street of its UNESCO-listed old town. 🏰 is the fortress of Kamianets-Podilskyi on its river canyon, and the castles of Khotyn and Lutsk. 🌊⚓ is Odesa on the Black Sea, with the Potemkin Stairs, its famous opera house 🎭 and a humour of its own.

🏔️🌲 are the Carpathian Mountains, where Hoverla (2,061 m) is the highest peak, and the home of the Hutsuls. 🏞️ is the Dnipro, the great river that crosses the country. 🌳 is the green "Tunnel of Love", a railway line through a living arch of trees near Klevan. 🚆 is Ukrzaliznytsia, the railway whose trains kept running through the war, and ✈️ the Antonov An-225 Mriya ("Dream"), the heaviest aircraft ever flown, built in Kyiv and destroyed at Hostomel in 2022. ☢️ is Chornobyl, the nuclear disaster of 26 April 1986, which emptied the town of Prypiat.

Ukraine emoji for holidays, culture and sport

Ukraine now celebrates Christmas on 25 December. On Christmas Eve, Sviat Vechir, the family sits down to twelve meatless dishes when the first star 🌟 appears, beginning with kutia, wheat with poppy seeds and honey; carollers go from house to house with a star on a pole. The greeting is З Різдвом Христовим! 🎄 Easter (Velykden) is a basket 🧺 of paska bread and eggs taken to church to be blessed, with the greeting Христос воскрес! and the answer Воістину воскрес! The eggs are krashanky, dyed one colour, and pysanky 🥚, drawn with beeswax in patterns that differ from region to region.

On Kupala night at midsummer people jump over bonfires 🔥 and float flower wreaths 💐 on the river. Vyshyvanka Day, the third Thursday of May, sends the whole country to school and work in embroidered shirts 👕🧵🪡. 🎨 is Petrykivka, the flowing flower painting from the village of Petrykivka, on UNESCO's list since 2013, and 💃🕺 the hopak, the leaping dance of the Cossacks 🐎⚔️. On the fourth Saturday of November, the Day of Remembrance of the Holodomor, the famine of 1932–1933, families put a lit candle 🕯️ in the window.

Independence Day, 24 August, marks the declaration of 1991 and is written 🇺🇦💙💛 with З Днем Незалежності! 📖 is Taras Shevchenko, the poet of the Kobzar, born a serf, whose portrait is on the 100-hryvnia note. 🎤🏆 is Eurovision, which Ukraine has won three times: Ruslana in 2004, Jamala in 2016 and Kalush Orchestra with "Stefania" in 2022.

In sport, 🇺🇦⚽ is the national team and Andriy Shevchenko, who won the Ballon d'Or in 2004, and the clubs Dynamo Kyiv and Shakhtar Donetsk, both winners of European cups. 🥊 is boxing: the brothers Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, Vitali mayor of Kyiv since 2014, and Oleksandr Usyk, who in 2024 became the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. 🎾 is Elina Svitolina, and 🏅🏆 the medals of athletes such as the high jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh.

How to type Ukrainian letters Ґ Є І Ї and the hryvnia ₴

Ukrainian is written in a Cyrillic alphabet of 33 letters (the Ukrainian Letters collection on this site has all of them). Its distinctive letters are Ґ ґ, a hard g as in go (ґудзик, button), while plain Г is a soft voiced h; Є є, said "ye" (Європа, Europe); І і, said "ee" (ніч, night); and Ї ї, said "yi" (їжак, hedgehog 🦔, and the name of the capital, Київ). И и is a short i, close to the i in sit. Ukrainian uses an apostrophe ʼ to keep a consonant hard before я, ю, є, ї: пʼять (five), мʼясо (meat), сімʼя (family). Ґ was dropped from the official alphabet in 1933 and brought back in 1990.

Windows, macOS, Android and iPhone all have a Ukrainian keyboard. On the computer layouts І, Ї and Є sit where the Russian layout has Ы, Ъ and Э; on phones, long-press Г for Ґ. Without the layout, type the code and then Alt+X in Word: 0490 for Ґ, 0491 for ґ, 0404 and 0454 for Є є, 0406 and 0456 for І і, 0407 and 0457 for Ї ї, 02BC for the apostrophe. In everyday typing people often use the ordinary apostrophe ' or ’ instead; ʼ (U+02BC) is the character Unicode recommends, because it counts as a letter, so search and spell-checkers keep a word like пʼять in one piece.

The currency is the hryvnia (code UAH), named after a silver ingot of Kyivan Rus and introduced in 1996; one hryvnia is 100 kopiyok. Its sign ₴, a cursive Ukrainian г crossed by two lines, was introduced by the National Bank of Ukraine in 2004 and is U+20B4 in Unicode, ₴ in HTML. Ukrainian writes the amount first: 100 ₴ or 100 грн. Quotation marks are «Київ», with „ “ inside them.